Apple Watch Will Demand Special Safes, Scales

Apple remains tight-lipped about how much its upcoming Apple Watches will cost, but new reports make one thing very clear: The gold-plated edition will be expensive enough to merit safes in Apple’s retail stores.

According to the blog 9to5Mac, which has a solid track record when it comes to accurately predicting Apple’s moves, the safes will feature chargers so the watches can power up overnight.

“Apple is also working on special weight scales for its retail stores to weigh the amount of gold in individual Apple Watch Edition variants,” the blog added. “The scales will be used to weigh the amount of gold in Apple Watch Editions upon replacement or return.” In theory, that will ensure that nobody returning a high-end Apple Watch tries to strip out some of the gold, first.

If the gold Apple Watch is priced at thousands of dollars, as some expect, it could raise some interesting questions about device longevity. While some people already spend thousands of dollars on a watch, it’s with the expectation that the hardware will last several years, if not decades. Contrast that with the Apple Watch, filled with delicate electronics that will degrade over the course of just a couple years… and which will likely be obsolete in less time than that.

Will Apple offer to regularly upgrade the internals of all gold Apple Watches? Or will the devices become an extreme status symbol—ultra-expensive for most folks, yet functional and cutting-edge for only a very limited amount of time?

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Author Bio

Nick Kolakowski has written for The Washington Post, Slashdot, eWeek, McSweeney's, Thrillist, WebMD, Trader Monthly, and other venues. He's also the author of "A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps" and "Slaughterhouse Blues," a pair of noir thrillers.